After a discussion with my friend Erik and following the consumption of much pastry, I decided to try and write a networked filesystem using only Ruby) and FUSE. After one iteration, I had everything documented and ready to go but I wasn’t happy with the design or the architecture. In large part, I discovered shortcomings in my own code base as I was writing the documentation. Writing with the intent of explaining my ideas to a newcomer gave me opportunity to find the major flaws in my own creation. Documentation is a good thing, if only because it makes you think about things in a whole new way. Anyway, after rewriting things and shrinking the code base down to size, I’m please to release the first version of RadiateFS, a networked filesystem written in Ruby and making use of the most-excellent FUSE bindings. Other than Ruby (tested using Ruby 1.8.7 on Debian Lenny) and FUSE itself, it has no other external dependencies. It used the DRb distributed object code bundled with the standard Ruby distribution. This would not have been possible without the help and inspiration of a few exceptional individuals:  Erik Ordway and the folks on freenode’s #ruby-lang channel. In particular drbrain and raggi. You can download a tarball here (v0.2b) and read the mildly-hilarious FAQ below. Does it work?Yes. Well, sort of. It works well enough that I feel comfortable releasing it in accordance with the principal of “release early, release often”. Now that I’ve done the “early” bit, let’s see how the “often” part goes. How do I install it? You’ll need a few things. On Debian-friendly systems, you can install the pre-requisites like so: sudo aptitude install ruby1.8 fuse-utils libfusefs-ruby1.8 and that should pull in what you need. After that, you can download the tarball, unpack it and go to town. Of course, you’ll need to do this on any system on which you want to use RadiateFS, whether it be client or server. How do I use it? It’s rather simple really. Once you’ve got the required packages installed and the tarball unpacked, you can share a directory on the server like so: ruby radiate-server.rb -d source/ -l 0 -s host -p 54321 In this case, we’ere sharing a directory named “source” using a loglevel of 0 on a host named “host” listening on port 54321. In the directory you ran this in, you’ll see a log named ‘radiate-server.log’ which, with a loglevel of 0 (debug), will have a whole lot of stuff in it. Then, on the client, you can run this to mount the remote directory: ruby radiatefs.rb -d test -s host -p 54321 to mount the remote directory over a local directory named test. Why do directories act funny? Remember that whole “release early” bit? Well, it’s early and not everything works right. Right now, you can get at files for which you have a proper pathname no matter how deep in a shared directory tree you are. The problem comes when trying to get a directory listing for directories below the top level. Patches welcome. Is it secure? Absolutely not. I haven’t even completely implemented support for the ACL functionality which comes wit DRb. Don’t use this over the internet or any insecure network. Why on earth would you write this? First, I was interested by the idea of putting DRb and FUSE together. Then, it was for the challenge. Looking back, it was mostly for the lolz. What is your favorite food? Toss up between good olives and good curry. Why is it read-only? The way things are set up right now, the instance of the class which specifies the FUSE mapping is shared directly. Therefore, all methods invoked on the client are actually executed on the server. While I *could* technically get write support working, I’d rather wait and rewrite this piece to have the FUSE directory objects live on the clients and connect to a broker on the server which implements proper threading and synchronization. If I’m imagining things correctly, it’ll add a degree of scaleability as well. Is it documented? Yes. You can run rdoc on the source and it’ll generate the documentation. Other than that, you can certainly go source diving as this might be a neat way for people to learn about DRB and/or FUSE. How is it licensed? GPL. What’s next? Well, I’d like to fix directory support and add auto-discovery using Rinda. Should be neat to enable clients to automagically find the server and connect to it. Could be cool, right? I found a bug. What now? Please contact me and let me know about it so I can fix the issue. If you help me fix it, I’ll gladly give you credit for your contribution.